This invention relates to the fields of computer systems and electronic commerce. More particularly, a system and methods are provided for facilitating an electronic commerce transaction involving multiple parties.
Existing electronic commerce systems primarily implement catalog models of business, wherein a selling party presents a list of products or services to a potential buyer. The buyer is limited to reviewing the list as he or she would peruse a catalog in a traditional “brick and mortar” establishment. These electronic commerce systems thus merely mimic only the most primitive or basic commercial transactions.
In contrast, most “real world” commerce involves more than one seller and one buyer. In particular, intermediaries are often involved in combining, assembling or aggregating products or services offered by different suppliers until, finally, the buyer accepts an offer consisting of one possible combination of the goods/services. Thus, before the consumer chooses to buy something from the seller, there may have been numerous other transactions to enable or support the final sale.
Unfortunately, each of those transactions are typically performed in the same manner as the final sale. Each intermediate party (e.g., retailer, distributor, wholesaler) may transact with another party (e.g., broker, manufacturer, service provider) to buy or sell a component of what the buyer ultimately purchases. This is inefficient because of the amount of effort that must be applied to arrange and complete each intermediate transaction. More specifically, each intermediate transaction must be separately negotiated and closed before the next one can be conducted.
The chain of transactions is also rather rigid, in that each intermediate transaction may be structured in accordance with past transactions rather than allowing for different combinations of components that have not been previously attempted. In particular, an intermediate broker or other party cannot offer a novel combination of goods and/or services that may be attractive to a different buyer.
Thus, what is needed is a system and method for facilitating the construction or assembly of multi-party transaction offers by or on behalf of manufacturers, suppliers, producers, distributors, consumers, etc. The flexible creation of unique and custom offers would be enabled, along with the creation of basic and repeatable transactions.
What is also needed is a system and method for closing a multi-party transaction whereby each party's obligations may be dependent upon the acceptance of a top-level offer that is an aggregation of multiple lower-level offers. At closing, the system would ensure disbursement of the necessary value (e.g., money) to the various parties and ensure fulfillment of each performer's obligations.